In The Content Code, Schaefer explains how we have now evolved to the point where distribution of content is perhaps the most important element in the crowded “content shocked” world we live in today.

Questions I ask Mark:

What is Content Shock? How do you avoid it?

What role can marketers play in making your content stand out?

Why do people share content? What do they share?

What You’ll Learn if You Give a Listen:

How content marketing has changed over the years

Why engagement is so important in content marketing

How new technology will change how we engage with content in the future

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Hostgator, where you’ll get 24 hour live support via chat, phone or email, 1-click WordPress installs, easy-to-use website builder, design services, marketing services like SEO and PPC, and for my listeners: a 30% Discount. Go to www.Hostgator.com/promo/ducttape

In Captivology Parr lists and examines 7 triggers that make up the most potent path to capturing people’s attention. While these might not represent a linear path, they do point to elements every business must consider in their products, services, campaigns and even content.

1. Automaticity Trigger
This is the thing that forces people to look your way, it’s what disrupts and gains attention.

2. Framing Trigger
In this trigger you are going to change people’s expectations in order to get them thinking and talking.

3. Disruption Trigger
With this trigger, you will disrupt through surprise, simplicity, and significance.

4. Reward Trigger
Think about all of those video games that people play for hours just to earn the next level.

5. Reputation Trigger
Today this might play out in your authority building and social proof offered by others.

6. Mystery Trigger
TV shows add mystery with the cliffhanger ending to get people to pay attention until the very end.

Is there a way to differentiate capturing genuine long-term attention and hype?

How do you measure whether or not you have captured your customers’ attention?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

What “Captivology” means

What triggers captivation

How pop stars like Beyonce and Taylor Swift capture and keep their fans’ attention, and how to use that in business

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast was brought to you by VeriSign and the Make Your Idea Internet Official Contest. Register a new .COM domain name with a participating registrar during the contest entry period and enter for an opportunity to win up to $35,000! Learn more about the contest and its rules at www.verisigncontest.com

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is also brought to you by Hostgator, where you’ll get 24 hour live support via chat, phone or email, 1-click WordPress installs, easy-to-use website builder, design services, marketing services like SEO and PPC, and for my listeners: a 30% Discount. Go to www.Hostgator.com/promo/ducttape

Officially a startup is any business just getting started but over the last few years the term startup has come to mean a certain kind of business just getting started or perhaps even a certain mindset no matter how old the business is.

Personally I lean towards the latter. Startup is more of a mindset than a timeframe and that can be a good thing and a bad thing.

Many startup businesses never graduate to become real businesses because what it took to start is not what it took to grow and mature.

For some the chaos of “everyone does everything” is intoxicating. For others the inability of the founder to surround themselves with people that support the gaps they might have in marketing, operations, finance and even leadership either leads to certain death of a kind of stagnant purgatory of just enough revenue to pay the bills. (Otherwise known as a job.)

In a testament to either my advancing age or strident consistency, I had Guy on this show over a decade ago when Art of the Start 1.0 came out.

Much has changed in the last 10 years and much has remained the same. In a note that struck me personally Guy claims that the hardest part of starting a business is learning how to lead and inspire others and I certainly concur.

By nature the very strengths the serve them getting started – things like tenacity, ingenuity and constant innovation (sometimes manifest as the idea of the week) are the things that sink them when they need to let go.

Guy is always a fun interview and The Art of the Start 2.0 is a must read of any – yes any – business owners or wannabe business owner.

Questions I ask Guy:

What is a Startup?

How do you make a pitch to potential investors?

How do you effectively build a team?

What You’ll Learn If You Give A Listen:

Why to hire people with complimentary skills to yours

How to raise funds for your startup using traditional and new methods

What venture capitalists and evangelists look for in a potential investment

David’s company helps organizations engage and reward employees and keep them motivate and he’s distilled a great deal of what he’s learned in building his own business and the good, bad and ugly he’s witnessed in organizations he has worked with over the years into his principles for becoming a top 10% manager.

Questions I ask David:

What stops people from succeeding at being great leaders?

How do you properly invest in the people that are struggling within your company?

How do people find, hire and keep good leaders?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How to become an effective leader for your employees

How to avoid insecurity in your managers

How to keep your employees engaged

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast was brought to you by VeriSign and the Make Your Idea Internet Official Contest. Register a new .COM domain name with a participating registrar during the contest entry period and enter for an opportunity to win up to $35,000! Learn more about the contest and its rules at www.verisigncontest.com

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is also brought to you by Hostgator, where you’ll get 24 hour live support via chat, phone or email, 1-click WordPress installs, easy-to-use website builder, design services, marketing services like SEO and PPC, and for my listeners: a 30% Discount. Go to www.Hostgator.com/promo/ducttape

Word of mouth marketing is the encouragement of a business to get their consumers and customers to talk about that company’s products and services as often as possible.

And the reality is that word of mouth marketing may, in fact, be the oldest form of marketing that exists. Back when finding the food and water you needed to trek across the desert meant life or death you better believe that people asked other people where the best places to get such food and water might be.

In today’s socially charged marketing world, word of mouth marketing has taken on a renewed importance as a positive share or a negative review may mean life or death for the business rather than the consumer.

Building influence, authority, shareability, telling stories and crafting a reputation for doing what you promise and perhaps occasionally blowing expectation out of the water are mandatory marketing practices today.

Questions I asked Ted:

How do you define “Word of Mouth Marketing?”

What kinds of stories do you have to tell to get people to share your stories?

How do you find and influence influencers?

What you’ll learn if you give a Listen:

The origins of Word of Mouth Marketing

Why you must connect with your customers personally to make sales

How to build a tribe of followers that take your recommendations seriously

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast was brought to you by VeriSign and the Make Your Idea Internet Official Contest. Register a new .COM domain name with a participating registrar during the contest entry period and enter for an opportunity to win up to $35,000! Learn more about the contest and its rules at www.verisigncontest.com

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is also brought to you by Hostgator, where you’ll get 24 hour live support via chat, phone or email, 1-click WordPress installs, easy-to-use website builder, design services, marketing services like SEO and PPC, and for my listeners: a 30% Discount. Go to www.Hostgator.com/promo/ducttape

The use of data and process in sales has grown substantially over the past decade and may indeed signal the need for a new kind of leader in the sales department.

Roberge points to a change in buyer behavior driving the need for change in selling behavior and clearly suggests that these types of changes tend to be more permanent than some change created by a new selling technique.

Of course now that the buyer has access to all the data available they don’t need access to the data they need someone who can help them make sense of the data and that’s the job of the new sales leader.

Lastly, Roberge outlines the idea of a content production process that functions as a tool to drive sales conversations. This notion runs counter to the way content is viewed in most organizations today, but offer perhaps the most potent way to see ROI on your content outlay.

In a nice touch, the proceeds of the sales of this book is Build Boston an organization that leads troubled youth towards the path of entrepreneurship.

What I’ll ask Mark:

How do you get involved in the customer journey earlier?

What tools do you use to make data make sense?

How do you hire salespeople for inbound marketing?

What You’ll learn if you give a listen:

How Hubspot became one of the leaders in inbound marketing

How to leverage social selling properly

Why buyer personas should be more important than lead scores

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast was brought to you by VeriSign and the Make Your Idea Internet Official Contest. Register a new .COM domain name with a participating registrar during the contest entry period and enter for an opportunity to win up to $35,000! Learn more about the contest and its rules at www.verisigncontest.com

There was a time when people toiled away in remote suburban garages hammering out their big idea. Many of the world’s greatest companies and innovations happened this way, but today there’s a decidedly different option available known as connectional intelligence.

Connectional intelligence, or the capability to consistently deliver breakthrough innovation and results by harnessing the value of relationships and networks, is being used by organizations to solve complex problems and innovate growth and may just be one of the most powerful ways to get really big things done today.

We see connectional intelligence at play in the way people connect with intention in social networks to build a business or create a wave of social change, but developing this form of connecting is something that organizations are just now learning how to tap for everyday innovations.

During our interview Dhawan shares a story of an organization that had a formulation problem with one if its products and although they employed a host of chemists they eventually decided to put the problem out to the science world and a physicist showed them that the problem wasn’t a chemical formulation one and they quickly solved the problem with his input.

For me, this concept is something that can inform any idea. I’ve developed a marketing system and brand and now taken that to other independent marketing consultants as way spread this idea. The thing I’ve learned is that the connectional intelligence of the group, as it grows, is surely making the idea better as well as bigger.

Now that we have the tools to connect so easily around the world, the key is to get very, very intentional about building the highest quality relationships around your big ideas.

Some of the questions I asked Erica:

What is connectional intelligence?

What are some ways people can activate their connectional intelligence?

How do you create connectional intelligence internally within your organization?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How to connect with people in order to get big things done

How businesses leverage this idea of connectional intelligence to build trust

How our understanding of connectional intelligence will change the way businesses operate in the future

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast was brought to you by VeriSign and the Make Your Idea Internet Official Contest. Register a new .COM domain name with a participating registrar during the contest entry period and enter for an opportunity to win up to $35,000! Learn more about the contest and its rules at www.verisigncontest.com

I’ll get straight to it today – my guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Neil Patel, founder of online tools and services such as Crazy Egg, KISSMetrics, and HelloBar.

Like so many things that are truly useful, Patel created his tools, and eventually his companies, in order to solve a need he had in his own marketing efforts.

Along the way, he has become, in my opinion, one of the best marketing and conversion experts on the planet because he excels at testing and analyzing data. In the end, that the secret to most effective marketing.

You can growth hack and try this and that to create demand but meticulously analyzing and eventually improving every element of your marketing efforts is the secret to success.

Patel’s Crazy Egg tools helps marketers understand website visitor behavior in order to make it as easy as possible for the user to do what they want to do on your site. KISSMetrics helps you understand who is visiting your site and how effective your marketing efforts are at converting them to customers. (Just visiting his sites is a lesson in conversion.)

There are many, many tools aimed at helping you use science and data to win, but unless you make the effort to understand and employ them you are simply guessing in your attempts to successfully market your business.

As a bonus, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out one of the greatest free sources of information online: Pate’s free QuickSprout University online training courses rival most paid training – go get them!

Some of the questions I asked Neil:

Are blogs still an effective approach for business?

What advice do you give for marketers to target mobile users?

When should you consider mobile PPC advertising?

Some of what you’ll learn if you give a listen:

Traffic, conversion and conversion optimization

How and why to use Crazy Egg to maximize conversion rate

When and why to use more powerful analytics services than Google Analytics